We share your concern about data permanence and persistence. First, since GoGrid is built on a grid of servers (nodes) and each node is built using RAID protected storage volumes, should a node disk experience an issue, standard RAID practices apply. This means that is it pretty difficult to lose your data. However, we do recommend that you back up your data regularly using whatever process you choose.

Also, when you deploy a new GoGrid server, it is typically created within different nodes within the grid, so, yes you could use a new GoGrid server instance for backup.

Future releases of GoGrid will include other methods for storing your data so we recommend that you check back frequently.

But bottom line, it is recommended with this and any other hosting solution that you employ some sort of manual or automated backup.

One of my main concerns is the permanence of the data we store. With actual servers, we use raid drives or backup the data to a separate server to reduce the chance of data loss.

Because these are instances instead of individual servers, I can’t shake the feeling (perhaps wrong) that there is a higher chance of data loss.

Is backing up data to a separate instance reasonable protection? Do you offer some form of permanent/protected backup space connected to the grid? Can you perhaps explain in more detail how we’re protected from failure?

Yes, when the new RAM configurations (4GB and 8GB) are rolled out, they are tied to larger hard drive allocations (250 GB and 500 GB respectively). We don’t have a release date on those but it will be fairly soon. Just check back on the blog regularly (or subscribe to the RSS feed).
Thanks,
Michael